Guggenheim

Daniel Barenboim (Conductor and Pianist, Argentina)
Daniel Barenboim is a world-renowned conductor and pianist. Since his international debut performance as a solo pianist at the age of ten, he has regularly performed in Europe and the United States, as well as in South America, Australia, and Asia. Barenboim has also been in great demand as a conductor with leading orchestras around the world. He currently serves as general music director of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden and maestro scaligero of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. He is honorary conductor for life of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and principal conductor for life of the Staatskapelle Berlin.

In 1999 Barenboim and Palestinian literary scholar Edward Said set up the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which brings together young musicians from Israel and the Arab countries every summer with the aim of enabling a dialogue between cultures and promoting this through the experience of making music. Barenboim has also initiated a project for music education in the Palestinian territories, which includes the foundation of a music kindergarten as well as a Palestinian youth orchestra.

In 2002 Barenboim and Said were awarded the Príncipe de Asturias Prize for their peace efforts. Barenboim is the recipient of numerous other prestigious awards, both for his contributions to peace and tolerance and for his achievements in music, among them the Tolerance Prize by the Evangelische Akademie Tutzing, the Peace Prize by the Korn and Gerstenmann Foundation in Frankfurt, the Moses Mendelssohn Medal, the Buber-Rosenzweig-Medal, the Hessische Friedenspreis, the Preis des Westfälischen Friedens, Germany’s Großes Verdienstkreuz mit Stern, the Goethe Medal, France’s Grand Officier dans l’Ordre national de la Légion d’Honneur, the Wolf Foundation’s Arts Prize, the Kulturgroschen, the highest honor awarded by the Deutscher Kulturrat, the international Ernst von Siemens Musikpreis, Japan’s Praemium Imperiale, and the German Kulturpreis. In 2003 Barenboim, the Staatskapelle Berlin, and the chorus of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden were awarded a Grammy for their recording of Wagner’s Tannhäuser. He and the Staatskapelle were also honored with the Wilhelm-Furtwängler-Preis the same year.

In 2006 Barenboim was invited to deliver the BBC Reith Lectures, and a six-part lecture series at Harvard University as Charles Eliot Norton Professor. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon named Barenboim a U.N. Messenger of Peace the following year. Barenboim has received honorary degrees from the University of Oxford and the Royal Academy of Music in London and is the author of a number of books: an autobiography, A Life in Music; Parallels and Paradoxes, which he wrote with Edward Said; Everything Is Connected; and, with Patrice Chéreau, Dialoghi su musica e teatro: Tristano e Isotta.

Elizabeth Diller (Designer USA)
Elizabeth Diller is a founding principal of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a 70-person interdisciplinary design studio that integrates architecture, the visual arts, and the performing arts. Diller attended the Cooper Union School of Art and received a bachelor of architecture degree from the Cooper Union School of Architecture. She is a professor of architecture at Princeton University.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s international body of work includes the recent redesign of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York; the High Line, an urban park situated on an obsolete elevated railway in New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art on Boston’s waterfront; the Creative Arts Center at Brown University; and the Blur Building, built on Lake Neuchâtel for the 2002 Swiss Expo. In 1999 Diller and Ricardo Scofidio received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for their commitment to integrating architecture with issues of contemporary culture. They were recently made fellows of the Royal Institute of British Architects and were inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008. For their contribution to art and design, Diller and Scofidio were named among Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2009.

Other prestigious awards and honors received by Diller Scofidio + Renfro include the National Design Award from the Smithsonian, the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an Obie for Creative Achievement in Off-Broadway Theater, the AIA President’s Award, the AIA Medal of Honor, and numerous AIA Honor Awards. In 2003 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York held a retrospective of the studio’s work, recognizing the firm’s unorthodox practice. In 2010 Fast Company named Diller Scofidio + Renfro the most innovative design practice in the profession and among the 50 most innovative companies in the world.

Nicholas Humphrey (Theoretical Psychologist, UK)
Nicholas Humphrey is a theoretical psychologist, based in Cambridge, who is known for his work on the evolution of human intelligence and consciousness. His interests are wide-ranging. He studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda, was the first to demonstrate the existence of “blindsight” after brain damage in monkeys, proposed the celebrated theory of the “social function of intellect,” and is the only scientist ever to edit the literary journal Granta. His many books include Consciousness Regained, A History of the Mind, Leaps of Faith, Seeing Red, and most recently Soul Dust. He has been the recipient of several honors, including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, the British Psychological Society’s Book Award, and the Pufendorf medal. He has been a lecturer in psychology at Oxford University, assistant director of the Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour at the University of Cambridge, senior research fellow in parapsychology at the University of Cambridge, professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research, New York, and school professor at the London School of Economics.

Muchadeyi Ashton Masunda (Mayor of Harare, Zimbabwe)
Muchadeyi Ashton Masunda is mayor of Harare, capital of Zimbabwe. He holds a bachelor of law (honors) degree from the University of Zimbabwe and is a fellow and accredited tutor of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators in the United Kingdom. His extensive experience in business, law, and arbitration includes 12 years as a practicing attorney, four years as the founding executive director of the Commercial Arbitration Centre in Harare, and nearly three years as the chief executive of Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe, publishers of The Daily News and The Daily News on Sunday. He is chairman of 12 companies and director of two. He also serves on the international panel of arbitrators for the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, and has served as chairman and/or director of a number of corporate, professional, educational, charitable, and sporting organizations in Zimbabwe.

Masunda has presented papers on local government, corporate governance, and arbitration both nationally and internationally. In March 2010 he was elected vice president for the Southern Africa region of the United Cities and Local Governments of Africa (UCLGA), and in October 2010 as co-president of the international United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG). Masunda is also a member of the United Nations Advisory Committee of Local Authorities.

Enrique Peñalosa (Former Mayor of Bogatá)
Enrique Peñalosa is an influential thinker in the design of livable cities, with a particular interest in the relationship between urban design and sustainability, mobility, equity, public space, and well-being. As mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, between 1998 and 2000, Peñalosa implemented profound changes—many of them the first of their kind in the Americas—that transformed the seven-million-inhabitant city. In addition to vast improvements to the city’s slums and the construction of schools, nurseries, and libraries, he restricted car use, created a 300-kilometer network of bicycle paths, and radically improved pedestrian facilities. More than 100 kilometers of pedestrian-only streets and greenways were created, including Porvenir Promenade, a 24-kilometer pedestrian-and-bicycle-only street through the city’s poorest neighborhoods, and Juan Amarillo Greenway, a pedestrian street that connects the richest and poorest neighborhoods of the capital. Inspired by Curitiba, Brazil, he created the TransMilenio bus system, which has served as a model for many other cities and is now considered the best bus system in the world.

Peñalosa has lectured at universities throughout the world, as well as at environmental, urban, and managerial forums. His work and ideas, as well as his articles, have been featured in publications in many countries. He holds a bachelor of arts degree in economics and history from Duke University, a master’s degree in government from the Institute Internationale d’Administration Public (IIAP) in Paris, and a DESS in public administration from the Université de Paris II. He was a visiting scholar at New York University for three years and has taught at several Colombian universities. He is currently an urban vision and sustainability strategy consultant, working with local, regional, and national governments as well as other organizations all over the world, and is president of the board of directors of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP).

Juliet Schor (Economist and Professor of Sociology, USA)
Juliet Schor is professor of sociology at Boston College and a member of the MacArthur Foundation Connected Learning Research Network. Before joining Boston College, she taught at Harvard University, in the Department of Economics and the Committee on Degrees in Women’s Studies. A graduate of Wesleyan University, Schor received her PhD in economics at the University of Massachusetts.

Her most recent book is Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. Previous books include The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure and The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need, among other titles. Widely credited for influencing the national debate on work and family, The Overworked American appeared on the best-seller lists of The New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice, and The Boston Globe, as well as numerous annual best books lists.

Schor is a former Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language from the National Council of Teachers of English. In 2006 she received the Leontief Prize from the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University for expanding the frontiers of economic thought. She has served as a consultant to the United Nations, at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, and to the United Nations Development Program.

Schor is currently working on issues of environmental sustainability and their relation to Americans’ lifestyles and the economy and the emergence of a conscious consumption movement. She is a co-founder and co-chair of the board of the Center for a New American Dream, a national sustainability organization. In addition to the foregoing, she is a co-founder of the South End Press and the Center for Popular Economics; a former trustee of Wesleyan University; an occasional faculty member at Schumacher College; and a former fellow of the Brookings Institution. Schor has lectured widely throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan and appears frequently in national and international media.

Rirkrit Tiravanija (Artist, Thailand)
Born in Buenos Aires, the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is widely recognized as one of the most influential artists of his generation. His work defies media-based description, as his practice combines traditional object making, public and private performances, teaching, and other forms of public service and social action. Winner of the 2010 Absolut Art Award and the 2005 Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Guggenheim Museum, Tiravanija has also been awarded the Benesse Prize by the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum in Japan and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Lucelia Artist Award.

Tiravanija recently had a retrospective exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld. A previous retrospective exhibition was presented by the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam and then traveled to Paris and London. Tiravanija is on the faculty of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, and is a founding member and curator of Utopia Station, a collective project involving artists, art historians, and curators. He is also president of an educational-ecological project known as the Land Foundation in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and is part of a collective alternative space called VER, in Bangkok, where he maintains his primary residence and studio.

Geetam Tiwari (Professor, India)

Geetam Tiwari, an international authority on transportation planning and safety, serves as MoUD Chair Professor for Transport Planning at the Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

She has extensive research experience in dealing with transportation issues of special relevance to low-income countries, including development of safer and more efficient bus systems and road designs, with a particular focus on traffic and transport planning related to pedestrians, bicycles, and bus systems. With degrees from the University of Roorkee (BA, architecture) and the University of Illinois, Chicago (MA, urban planning and policy; Ph.D., transport planning and policy), Tiwari has served as Adlerbertska Guest Professor for sustainable urban transport at the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden (2007–2010).

Wang Shi (Entrepreneur, China)
Wang Shi is a prominent Chinese business leader who has served as an official of several associations in the fields of real estate and commerce. In 2010 he was named one of the 25 most influential business leaders in China by the Chinese edition of Fortune.

Wang established the Shenzhen Exhibition Center of Modern Science and Education Equipment, the predecessor of China Vanke Co., Ltd., in 1984. Vanke became the second listed company traded on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 1991 and is at present the largest professional residential dwelling developer in China. As chairman of its board of directors, Wang ensures that Vanke follows his philosophy of placing ethics above commercial interests. On the strength of its corporate governance, the company has been named China’s Most Esteemed Enterprise on seven occasions. Vanke consistently espouses the notion of a “healthy and enriching life,” offering ongoing development opportunities that encourage its 17,600 employees to grow with the company. Vanke was the only property developer among ten companies named as 2009 Best Employers in China by Hewitt Associates.

Wang has received LivCom’s Individual Achievement and Contribution Award and has been recognized with an Oscar for eco-protection, one of the highest global honors in the area of urban reconstruction and community management, endorsed by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and presented under the auspices of the International Federation of Parks and Recreation Administration (IFPRA). From 2007 to 2009 Wang was director of the Society of Entrepreneurs and Ecology (SEE), one of the largest nongovernmental environmental protection organizations in China.

Wang is currently an independent director for numerous publicly listed and nonlisted companies, serves as a part-time EMBA lecturer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and is an honorary governing councillor of the China Entrepreneur Club. He speaks widely on the Chinese private sector, both in China and abroad.